Projects

Small things I've built. A few are useful; most exist for their own sake.

Play these in your browser

Small games in C, Rust, Elm and Haskell. Five are compiled to WebAssembly and playable here. They share a design brief from an old README: everything is pushable, and optimise for OMG WOW moments.

These five grew out of one 685-commit repo that got away from me. In the history there's a level called 09_true_infinite.txt, a 05_curry.lvl titled "Currying: Make +5 Function", and a commit that just says "Put OMG TESTING level at the top". The main branch is mostly a segfault diary, including three separate reverts of a time machine.

Polyhedra playground

Lifted wholesale from my intuition project and embedded here to run: a from-scratch general Conway engine, nothing hard-coded per solid.

chip8

C · wasm port pending

A CHIP-8 emulator with a portable core and 36 real ROMs bundled - PONG, TETRIS, INVADERS among them. It currently runs in a terminal; a browser port is planned.

Things that are alive on the internet

• t8r8r - "fulfilling your potato-rating needs." An ELO ranking system. For potatoes. Commits include "Add cringey /about page" and "Make potatoes more boring". The joke is the product.
• shortstories.lol - short stories from language models I fine-tuned on my own laptop back in the Llama 2 days. They're not good, and I nearly cooked the MacBook making them. The domain's since lapsed; I might self-host the survivors.
• intuition - about 62 single-diagram maths proofs you can drag around and poke, plus a playground for Conway-operator polyhedra.
• classiccult - a zero-backend site listing classic and cult films across a handful of London cinemas. A GitHub Action scrapes the listings once a day into a static JSON file. To get past one cinema's Cloudflare I piggyback a stranger's residential-Pi open-data project. Nothing to host, nothing to pay for.
• choosetwo - trilemmas as SVG triangles: pick any two. CAP theorem, Zooko's triangle, Epicurus, and one for Career / Family / Hobbies. "Life is short; make a conscious decision how to spend it."

The ones that only have a gif

Terminal and GUI games with no browser versions. There are gifs.

• snake-hs - Snake, in Haskell, with brick and vty. There is a gif.
• pong-rs - Pong in Rust and ncurses. The README promises an "Unbeatably intelligent AI". It is not.
• hah - a small Rust arcade game with a GUI, and an example.gif to prove it.

The meta bits

• super-simple-static-site-generator - "150 lines of fabulous shell script." It ran this site for years; I'm slowly replacing it, which feels a bit ungrateful. One commit reads "this script has somehow grown 😱".
• Codeschool-Video-Downloader - quietly my most-starred repo (46 ⭐), pull requests from strangers and all. It downloads videos from a service that no longer exists. Timing is everything.
• tesco_rb - a Ruby gem wrapping the Tesco API. Commit log bookend: "Published Gem! :grinning:". Proof I once finished one.

The websites before this one

This is at least the sixth version of my personal site. Each rebuild fixed a problem the previous rebuild had caused. All of them are restored and browsable in the museum. In chronological order:

• 2014 - a Rails app on Heroku. jQuery, Isotope, ScrollMagic, a Google Map, a scrolling timeline, a contact form - one homepage carrying the full weight of a web framework. The commit that added my bio is titled "Wrote some text about me. Pretty mental." The bio itself began: "Hola. This is my wonderful, inspiring, groovy, egotistical, funky site." Browse it.
• 2014 - a Jekyll blog on the Lanyon theme, at wmmc.github.io. Vim mappings, Unix permissions, DNS. Also where the CV obsession started, with a post titled "My CV... in Pure Ruby". Browse it.
• 2020 - an org-mode static site. Disqus comments, some analytics, and - per the commit log - "only adding a bloody NYAN CAT". A later commit clarifies that "Rocket ships are ESPECIALLY important to me". Browse it.
• 2021 - ssssg, the 150-line shell script above, which I wrote from scratch and then moved the whole site onto. Notable commits: "Add MIT license ¯\_(ツ)_/¯", "Some styling - I have no idea what I'm doing", and, as the final commit, "this script has somehow grown 😱". Browse it.
• 2024 - Dockerised nginx, because obviously.
• now - hand-written HTML, the thing I was avoiding in 2014. Give it eighteen months.

Running alongside all of this, for ten years, was my CV. It went: pure Ruby → org-mode → pandoc PDF → JSON Resume → "try using pure HTML as a markdown file" → "Revert 'try using pure HTML as a markdown file'" → org-mode as an intermediate format → and finally, in 2024, the last commit: "Use Google Docs instead of anything fancy."

The early stuff (2014)

My first code, from 2014, left up on purpose.

• My-First-Big-Program - scrapes sites to build Google Ads campaigns. Contains the comment ### SCRAPE THE SITE. OMG. TOTES AWESOME and error messages picked at random from ["It's not your fault.", "Stop being stupid.", ...].sample.
• Sir-Archibalds-Twitter-Account - "Aristocrat, Philanthropist & Spelling Nazi." A bot that replied to tweets mentioning "manors" as an appalled toff: "Anything less than 800 acres is pitiful."
• Wordsearch and Crossword - puzzle generators.

Learning in public, with receipts

Books I worked through - including the ones I gave up on.

• writing-an-interpreter-in-go - roughly a third through the Monkey language. "Repl/main done - CHAPTER ONE DONE!!!!"
• crafting-compilers - a Lox interpreter, abandoned with impeccable timing at the "number literals" section.
• ziglings - about 80% done in one week of July 2023. "comptime is lit 🔥", "ZIGLING RUSH".
• advent-of-code - Elixir. Exactly one day attempted. "no interesting sizes though."